A typical day in the campus life is full of big and small inconveniences.  My pet peeves include: the streets outside Joongmoon covered with trash at night; people (professors and students alike) smoking everywhere; cheating behavior during exams...  the list goes on.  A lot of these annoyances are caused by peculiar human ways of thinking and behaving.  And something called “design thinking” may be the way to find novel and effective solutions to these problems.
  Design thinking is a relatively new approach to problem solving.  It can be roughly defined as considering a problem with “designing” a workable solution in mind. Why is design thinking needed?  Here are major features of design thinking, from which it draws its strengths:
  First, it is realistic. It starts from the assumption that human beings are not perfect.  Nevertheless, problems have to be solved; therefore, problem solving requires a deep understanding of being human.  Because we cannot expect people to think and behave in ideal ways, it is never sufficient to appeal to conscience or morality.
  Second, design thinking is optimistic. In spite of the human fallacies, the design thinker has a positive and utilitarian outlook that we can proactively cope with and overcome a given problem rather than giving up on it.
  Third, it is humanistic. Design thinking involves picturing an average person. It favors explanations that concern immediate contextual factors. Therefore it requires taking the perspective of a typical person who would engage in problematic thoughts or behavior instead of blaming the person or the society.
  Fourth, it is empirical. A thorough understanding of human thoughts and behavior should start from careful observations and interpretations of the real situation, not from abstract theories.  Therefore, it requires scientific and systematic methodologies to document and analyze thoughts and behavior. 
  Lastly, design thinking is creative. By applying scientific principles of human thoughts and behavior to the given problem, one can come up with solutions that cannot be gained with fixed, inflexible frames of thinking. 
  Let’s take littering for example. How would we decrease it?  A design thinker would think of ways to make people voluntarily refrain from throwing trash away.  Can we make them feel like being watched, without invading their privacy?  Can we make it more difficult to litter, and easier to put trash where we want?  Can we make the feel like there is a norm against littering? These questions may lead one to more effective and less costly solutions compared to more typical solution such as law enforcement.
  Design thinking may not solve all the problems in the world, but it may be effective in alleviating at least some problems to at least some degrees.  It is already applied widely to offer solutions that make the life better in the third world. Observe your surroundings and identify problems.  Think like a designer, and you may be able to fix your everyday annoyances, and even create a new market for your business!